"Nellie!" said Ned, at last, humbly, penitently, hopelessly. "I'm not a good man. I haven't been just what you think I've been." He stopped, then added, slowly and desperately as if on an afterthought: "If—your own heart—won't plead—for—me—it's not a bit of use my saying anything."

When one speaks as one feels one generally speaks to the point and this sudden despairing cry of Ned's was a better plea than any he could by long thinking have constructed. Wonderful are the intricacies of a man's mind, but still more intricate the mind of woman. Nellie at the moment did not care whether he had been saint or sinner. She felt that her love was vast enough to, wash him clean of all offending and make amend in him for all shortcoming. She could not bear to see him in pain thus when she was so happy; in uncertainty, in despair, when the measure of her love was not to be taken, so huge was it and all for him. If he had sinned, and how men sin there is little hid from the working girl, it was not from evil heart. If he had not been good he would be good. He would promise her.

"But you will be good now, will you not, Ned?" she asked, softly, not looking at him, dropping her hand against his, stealing her slender fingers into the fingers that nervously twirled the hat.

From bitter despondency Ned's thoughts changed to ecstatic hope. He swung round, his hand in Nellie's, his brain in a whirl. Was it a dream or was she really standing there in the strong moonshine, her lovelit eyes looking into his for a moment before the down-cast lids veiled them, her face flushed, her bosom heaving, her hand tenderly pressing his? He dropped his hat, careless, of the watery risk, and seizing her by both arms above the elbows, held her for a moment in front of him, striving to collect himself, vainly trying to subdue the excitement that made him think he was going to faint.

"Nellie!" he whispered, passionately, his craving finding utterance. "Kiss me!" She lifted up the flushed face, with the veiled downcast eyes and soft quivering lips. He passed his hands under her arms and bent down. Then a white mist came over his eyes as he crushed her to him and felt on his parched lips the burning kiss of the woman he loved. For a moment she rested there, in his arms, her mouth pressed to his. The rose, shattered, throw its petals as an offering upon the altar of their joy.

The Future, what did it matter to him? The scaffold or the gaol might come or go, what did it matter to him? It flashed through his mind that Nellie could be his wife before he went and then all the governments in the world and all the military and all the gatling guns might do their worst. They could not take from him a happiness he had not deserved, but which had come to him as a free gift in despite of his unworthiness. And as he thought this, Nellia shook herself out of his arms, pushing him so violently that he staggered and almost fell on the uneven rocks.

"I cannot," she cried, holding up her arms as if to ward him off. "I cannot, Ned. You mustn't touch me. I cannot."

"Nellie!" he replied, bewildered. "What on earth is the matter?"

"I cannot," she cried again. "Ned, you know I can't."

"Can't what?" he asked, gradually understanding.

"I can't marry. I shall never marry. It's cruel to you, contemptible of me, to be here. I forgot myself, Ned. Come along! It's madness to stay here."

She turned on her heel and walked off sharply, taking the upper path. He picked up his hat and hastily followed. There was nothing else to be done. Overtaking her, he strode along by her side in a fury of mingled rage, sorrow, anger and disappointment.

She paused at the corner of her street. As she did so bells far and near began to strike midnight, the clock at the City Hall leading off with its quarters. They had been gone an hour and a quarter. To both of them it seemed like a year.



CHAPTER IV.

THE WHY OF THE WHIM.

Nellie stopped at the corner of her street, under the lamp-post. Ned stopped by her side, fuming by now, biting his moustache, hardly able to hold his tongue. Nellie looked at him a moment, sadly and sorrowfully. The look of determination that made her mouth appear somewhat cruel was on her whole face; but with it all she looked heart-broken.

"Ned," she begged. "Don't be angry with me. I can't. Indeed, I can't."

"Why not?" he demanded, boiling over. "If you wouldn't have had me at first I wouldn't have blamed you. But you say you love me, or as good as say, and then you fly off. Nellie! Nellie, darling! If you only knew how for years I've dreamed of you. When I rode the horse's hoofs kept saying 'Nellie.' I used to watch the stars and think them like your eyes, and the tall blue gum and think it wasn't as full of grace as you. Down by the water just now I thought you wouldn't have me because I wasn't fit, and I'm not, Nellie, I'm not, but when I thought it I felt like a lost soul. And then, when I thought you loved me in spite of all, everything seemed changed. I seemed to feel that I was a man again, a good man, fit to live, and all that squatter government of ours could do, the worst they could do, seemed a bit of a joke while you loved me. And——"

"Ned! Ned!" begged Nellie, who had put her hands over her face while he was speaking. "Have pity on me! Can't you see? I'm not iron and I'm not ice but I can't do as others do. I cannot. I will not."

"Why not?" he answered. "I will speak, Nellie. Do you——"

"Ned!" she interrupted, evidently forcing herself to speak. "It's no use. I'll tell you why it's not."

"There can be no reason."

"There is a reason. Nobody knows but me. When I have said I would never marry people think it is a whim. Perhaps it is, but I have a reason that I thought never to tell anyone. I only tell you so that you may understand and we may still be friends, true friends."

"Go on! I'll convince you that it doesn't mean what you think it does, this reason, whatever it is."

"Ned! Be reasonable!" She hesitated. She looked up and down the street. Nothing moved. The moon was directly overhead. There were no shadows. It was like day. An engine whistle sounded like a long wail in the distance. In the silence that followed they could hear the rushing of a train. Ned waited, watching her pain-drawn face. A passionate fear assailed him, blotting out his wrath.

"You recollect my sister?" she asked, looking away from him.

He nodded.

"You heard she died? You spoke of her two years ago."

He nodded again.

"I did not tell you the whole truth then . . . . . . I did not tell anybody . . . . . . I came down here so as not to tell . . . . . . I could not bear to go home, to chance any of them coming down to Brisbane and seeing me . . . . . . You know." She stopped. He could see her hands wringing, a hunted look in the eyes that would not meet his.

"Never mind telling me, Nellie," he said, a great pity moving him. "I'm a brute. I didn't mean to be selfish but I love you so. It shall be as you say. I don't want to know anything that pains you to tell."

"That is your own self again, Ned," she answered, looking at him, smiling sadly, a love in her face that struck him with a bitter joy. "But you have a right. I must tell you for my own sake. Only, I can't begin." Her mouth trembled. Great tears gathered in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. A lump rose in his throat. He seized her hands and lifted them reverently to his lips. He could not think of a word to say to comfort her.

"Ned!" she said, in a tone almost inaudible, looking at him through her tears. "She died in the hospital but I didn't tell you how. . . . . She died, oh, a terrible death . . . . . . She had gone . . . . . down, Ned. Right down. Down to the streets, Ned."

He pressed her hands, speechless. They stood thus facing one another, till down his face, too, the sad tears rained in sympathy, sad tears that mourned without reproach the poor dead sister whom the hard world had crushed and scorned, sad tears that fell on his passion like rain on fire and left in him only a yearning desire to be a comforter. Nellie, snatching her hands away, pressed them to her mouth to stifle the frantic sobs that began to shake her, long awful sobs that drew breath whistling through clenched fingers. And Ned, drawing her to him, laid her head on his shoulder, stroking her hair as a mother does, kissing her temple with loving, passionless kisses, striving to comfort her with tender brotherly words, to still her wild cries and frantic sobs in all unselfishness. There were none to see them in all this moonlit city. The wearied toilers, packed around them, slumbered or tossed unconsciously. Above them, serene and radiant, the full moon swam on amid the stars.

"She was so good, Ned," cried Nellie, choking, with sobs, almost inarticulate, pouring out to him the pent-up thinking of long years. "She was so good. And so kind. Don't you remember her, Ned? Such a sweet girl, she was. It killed her, Ned. This cruel, cruel life killed her. But before it killed her—oh!—oh!—oh!—oh! Why are we ever born? Why are we ever born?"

It was heart-rending, her terrible grief, her abandonment of anguish which she vainly endeavoured to thrust back into her throat. With all her capacity for passionate love she bewailed her sister's fate. Ned, striving to soothe her, all the while mingled his tears with hers. A profound sadness overshadowed him. He felt all his hopes numbed and palsied in the face of this omnipotent despair. This girl who was dead seemed for the time the symbol of what Life is. He had hated Society, hated it, but as its blackest abyss opened at his very feet his hate passed from him. He only felt an utter pity for all things, a desire to weep over the helpless hopelessness of the world.

Nellie quieted at last. Her sobs ceased to shake her, her tears dried on her pale face, but still she rested her head on Ned as if finding strength and comfort in him. Her eyelids were closed except for an occasional belated lingering sob she might have been asleep. Her grief had exhausted her. At last a coming footfall roused her. She raised her head, putting her hands instinctively to her hat and hair, pulling herself together with a strong breath.

"You are very kind to me, Ned," she said, softly. "I've been so silly but I'm better now. I don't often carry on like that." She smiled faintly. "Let's walk a bit! I shall feel better and I have such a lot to tell you. Don't interrupt! I want you to know all about it, Ned." And so, walking backwards and forwards in the moonlit streets, deserted and empty, passing an occasional night prowler, watched with suspicious eyes by energetic members of the "foorce" whose beats they invaded, stopping at corners or by dead-walls, then moving slowly on again, she told him.

* * * * *

"You know how things were at home on the Darling Downs, Ned. Father a 'cooky,' going shearing to make both ends meet, and things always going wrong, what with the drought and the wet and having no money to do things right and the mortgage never being cleared off. It wasn't particularly good land, either, you know. The squatters had taken all that and left only stony ridges for folks like ours. And we were all girls, six of us. Your father was sold up, and he had you boys to help him. Well, my father wasn't sold up but he might as well have been. He worked like a horse and so did mother, what with the cows and the fowls and looking after things when father was away, and we girls did what we could from the time we were little chits. Father used to get up at daybreak and work away after dark always when he was at home. On Sunday mornings after he'd seen to the things he used to lie on his back under that tree in front if it was fine or about the house if it was wet, just dead beat. He used to put a handkerchief over his face but he didn't sleep much. He just rested. In the afternoon he used to have a smoke and a read. Poor father! He was always thought queer, you recollect, because he didn't care for newspapers except to see about farming in and took his reading out of books of poetry that nobody else cared about. On Monday he'd start to work again, with only a few hours for sleep and meals, till Saturday night. Yet we had only just a living. Everything else went in interest on the mortgage. Twelve per cent. Mother used to cry about it sometimes but it had to be paid somehow.

"When Mary was fifteen and I was thirteen, you remember, she went to Toowoomba, to an uncle of ours, mother's brother, who had four boys and no girls and didn't know what to put the boys to. Father and mother thought this a splendid chance for Mary to learn a trade, there were so many of us at home, you know, and so they took one of my cousins and uncle took Mary and she started to learn dressmaking. Uncle was a small contractor, who had a hard time of it, and his wife was a woman who'd got frozen about the heart, although she was as good as gold when it melted a little. She was always preaching about the need for working and saving and the folly of wasting money in drink and ribbons and everything but what was ugly. She said that there was little pleasure in the world for those who had to work, so the sooner we made up our minds to do without pleasure the better we'd get on. Mary lived with them a couple of years, coming home once in a while. Then she got the chance of a place where she'd get her board and half-a-crown a week. She couldn't bear aunt and so she took it and I went to live at uncle's and to learn dressmaking, too. That was six months after you went off, Ned. I wasn't quite fifteen and you were eighteen, past. Seven years ago. I was so sorry when you went away, Ned.

"Aunt wasn't pleasant to live with. I used to try to get on with her and I think she liked me in her way but she made me miserable with her perpetual lecturing about the sin of liking to look nice and the wickedness of laughing and the virtue of scraping every ha'penny. I used to help in the house, of course, when I came from work and I was always getting into trouble for reading books, that I borrowed, at odd minutes when aunt thought I ought to be knitting or darning or slaving away somehow at keeping uncomfortable. I used to tell Mary and Mary used to wish that I could come to work where she did. We used to see each other every dinner hour and in the evening she'd come round and on Sundays we used to go to church together. She was so kind to me, and loving, looking after me like a little mother. She used to buy little things for me out of her halfcrown and say that when she was older aunt shouldn't make me miserable. Besides aunt, I didn't like working in a close shop, shut up. I didn't seem to be able to take a good breath. I used to think as I sat, tacking stuff together or unpicking threads that seemed to be endless, how it was out in the bush and who was riding old Bluey to get the cows in now I was gone and whether the hens laid in the same places and if it was as still and fresh as it used to be when we washed our faces and hands under the old lean-to before breakfast. And Toowoomba is fresher than Sydney. I don't know what I'd have thought of Sydney then. I used to tell Mary everything and she used to cheer me up. Poor Mary!

"For a long while she had the idea of going to Brisbane to work. She said there were chances to make big wages there, because forewomen and draping hands were wanted more and girls who had anything in them had a better show than in a little place. I used to remind her that it was said there were lots too many girls in Brisbane and that unless you had friends there you couldn't earn your bread. But she used to say that one must live everywhere and that things couldn't be worse than they were in Toowoomba. You see she was anxious to be able to earn enough to help with the mortgage. Father had been taken sick shearing: and had to knock off and so didn't earn what he expected and that year they'd got deeper into debt and things looked worse than ever. One day he came into Toowoomba with his cart, looking ten years older. Next day, Mary told me she didn't care what happened, she was going to Brisbane to see if she couldn't earn some money or else they'd lose the selection and that she'd spoken for her place for me and I was to have it. She'd been saving up for a good while what she could by shillings and sixpences and pennies, doing sewing work for anybody who'd pay her anything in her own time. She said that when she'd got a five-pound-a-week place she'd come back for a visit and bring me a new dress, and mother and father and the others all sorts of things and pay the interest all herself and that I should have the next best place in the shop and come to live with her. We talked about going into business together and whether it wouldn't be better for father to throw up the selection after a while and live with us in Brisbane. Ah! What simple fools we were! If we had but known!

"So Mary went to Brisbane, with just a few shillings beside her ticket and hardly knowing a soul in the big town. I went to the station with her in the middle of the night. She was going by the night train because then she'd get to Brisbane in the morning and have the day in front of her and she had nowhere to go if she got in at night. I recollect thinking how sweetly pretty she looked as she sat in the carriage all alone.

"You remember her, Ned? Well, she got prettier and prettier as she grew older, not tall and big and strong-looking like me but smaller than I was even then and with a fresh round face that always smiled at you. She had small feet and hands and hair that curled naturally and her skin was dark, not fair like mine. People in Toowoomba used to turn and look at her when she went out and everybody liked her. She was so kind to everybody. And she was full of courage though she did cry a little when she kissed me good-bye, because I cried so. I could never have stopped crying had I but known how I should see her again.

"She wrote in two or three days to say that she had got a place, just enough to pay her board, and expected to get a better one soon. She was always expecting something better when she wrote and my aunt when I saw her wagged her head and said that rolling stones gathered no moss. The interest-day came round and father just managed to scrape the money together. They'd got so poor and downhearted that I used to cry at night thinking of them and I used to tell Mary when I wrote. I used to blame myself for it once but I don't now. We all get to believe at last in what must be will be, Ned. And then I had a letter from Mary telling me she had a much better place and in two or three weeks mother wrote such a proud pleased letter to say that Mary had sent them a five-pound note. And for about a year Mary sent them two or three pounds every month and at Christmas five pounds again. Then her letters stopped altogether, both to them and to me. To me she had kept writing always the same, kind and chatty and about herself. She told me she had to save and scrape a little but that she had hope some day to be able to get me down. I never dreamed it was not so, not even when the letters stopped, though afterwards, when I went through them, I saw that the handwriting, in the later ones, was shaky a little.

"We waited and waited to hear from her but no letter came to anybody. There was a girl I knew whose father had been working in Toowoomba and who was in the same shop for a little while and her father was going to Brisbane to a job and they were all going. He was a carpenter. She and I had got to be friendly after Mary went away and she promised to find her but couldn't. You see we were bush folks still and didn't think anything of streets and addresses and thought the post office enough. And when two months passed and no letter came mother wrote half crazy, and I didn't know what to do, and I wrote to the girl I knew to ask her to get me work so that I could go to look for Mary. It just happened that they wanted a body hand in her shop and they promised me the place and I went the next day I heard. They wanted a week's notice where I was working and didn't want to give up my things without but aunt went and got them and gave me the money for my fare and told me if I wanted to come back to write to her and she'd find the money again. Poor old aunt! I shall never forget her. Her heart was all right if she had got hard and unhappy. That's how I got to Brisbane to look for Mary.

"I went to board with the girl I knew. I was earning ten shillings a week and paid that for my board and helped with the ironing for my washing. Her father had got out of work again for times were bad and they were glad to get my money. Lizzie got ten shillings a week and she had a brother about fourteen who earned five shillings. That was about all they had to live on often, nine in the family with me and the rent seven shillings for a shell of a place that was standing close up against other humpies in a sort of yard. There were four little rooms unceiled and Lizzie and I slept together in a sort of shelf bedstead, with two little sisters sleeping on the floor beside us. When it was cold we used to take them in with us and heap their bedclothes on top of us. The wind came through the walls everywhere. Out in the bush one doesn't mind that but in town, where you're cooped up all day, it doesn't seem the same thing. We had plenty of bread and meat and tea generally but the children didn't seem to thrive and got so thin and pale-looking that I thought they were going to be ill. Lizzie's father used to come home, after tramping about for work, looking as tired as my father did after his long day in the fields and her mother fretted and worried and you could see things getting shabbier and shabbier every week. I don't know what I should have done only Lizzie and I now and then got a dress to make for a neighbour or some sewing to do, night-times. Lizzie's mother had a machine and we used that and they always made me keep my half of what we got that way, no matter how hard up they were. They never thought of asking for interest for the use of the machine. And all the while I was looking for Mary.

"I used to stand watching as the troops of girls went by to work and from work, morning and evening, going to a new place every day so that I shouldn't miss her and in the dinner hours I used to go round the work rooms to see if she worked in one of them or if anybody knew her. At first, when I had a shilling to spare, I put an advertisement that she would understand in the paper, but I gave that up soon. I never dreamed of going to the police station, any more than we had dreamed of it in Toowoomba. I just looked and looked but I couldn't find her.

"I shall never forget the first time I got out of work. One Saturday, without a minute's warning, a lot of us were told that we wouldn't be wanted for a week or two. Lizzie and I were both told. She could hardly keep herself from crying but I couldn't cry. I was too wretched. I thought of everything and there seemed nothing to do anywhere. At home they couldn't help me. I shrank from asking aunt, for she'd only offered to help me to come back and what could I do in Toowoomba if I got there? And how could I find Mary? I had only ten shillings in the world and I owed it all for my board. I got to imagining where I should sleep and how long I could go without dying of hunger and I hated so to go into the house with Lizzie to tell them. Lizzie's mother cried when she heard it and Lizzie cried, but I went into the bedroom when I'd put my money on the table and began to put my things in my box. They called me to dinner and when I didn't come and they found out that I meant to go because I couldn't pay any more they were so angry. Lizzie's mother wanted to know if they looked altogether like heathens and then we three cried like babies and I felt better. I used to cry a good deal in those days, I think.

"Lizzie's father got a job next week a few miles out of Brisbane and went away to it and on the Monday I answered an advertisement for a woman to do sewing in the house and was the first and got it. She was quite young, the woman I worked for, and very nice. She got talking to me and I told her how I'd got out of work and about Mary. I suppose she was Socialist for she talked of what I didn't understand much then, of how we ought to have a union to get wages enough to keep us when work fell off and of the absurdity of men and women having to depend for work upon a few employers who only worked them when they could get profit. She thought I should go to the police-station about Mary but I said Mary wouldn't like that. What was more to me at the time, she paid me four shillings a day and found me work for two weeks, though I don't think she wanted it. There are kind people in the world, Ned.

"I got back to regular work again, not in the same shop but in another, and then Lizzie's folks moved out to where her father was working. I and another girl got a room that we paid five shillings a week for, furnished, with the use of the kitchen. It cost us about ten shillings a week between us for food, and I got raised to twelve-and-six a week because they wanted me back where I'd worked before. So we weren't so badly off, and we kept a week ahead. Of course we lived anyhow, on dry bread and tea very often, with cakes now and then as a treat, boiled eggs sometimes and a chop. There was this about it, we felt free. Sometimes we got sewing to do at night from people we got to hear of. So we managed to get stuff for our dresses and we kept altering our hats and we used to fix our boots up with waxed threads. And all the time I kept looking for Mary and couldn't see her or hear of her.

"I had got to understand how Mary might live for years in a place like Brisbane without being known by more than a very few, but I puzzled more and more as to how she'd got the money she'd sent home. The places where she might have earned enough seemed so few that everybody knew of them. In all dressmaking places the general run of girls didn't earn enough to keep themselves decently unless they lived at home as most did. Even then they had a struggle to dress neatly and looked ill-fed, for, you see, it isn't only not getting enough it's not getting enough of the right food and getting it regularly. Most of the girls brought their lunch with them in a little paper parcel, bread and butter, and in some places they made tea. Some had lots of things to eat and lots to wear and plenty of pocket money and didn't seem to have to work but they weren't my sort or Mary's.

"What made me think first how things might be was seeing a girl in the second place I worked at. She looked so like Mary, young and fresh and pretty and lively, always joking and laughing. She was very shabby and made-over when I saw her first, with darned gloves and stitched-up boots down at heel and bits of ribbon that she kept changing to bring the best side up. Then she got a new dress all at once and new boots and gloves and hat and seemed to have money to spend and the girls began to pass remarks about her when she wasn't bearing and sometimes to her face when they had words with her. I didn't believe anything bad at first but I knew she wasn't getting any more pay and then, all at once, I recollected being behind her one night when we came out of the shop and seeing a young fellow waiting in a door-way near. He was a good-looking young fellow, well-dressed and well to do, and as she passed with some other girls he dropped his stick out in front of her and spoke to her. She laughed and ran back to the shop when we'd gone on a little further and spoke to him for a second or two as she passed him. It was after that she was well dressed and I saw her out with him once or twice and—and—I began to think of Mary. You see, I knew how hard the life was and how wearying it is to have to slave and half-starve all the time, and then Mary wanted money so to send home to help them. And when the girls talked at work they spoke of lots of things we never heard of in the bush and gradually I got to know what made me sick at heart.

"I was nearly mad when I thought of that about Mary, my sister Mary who was so good and so kind. I hated myself for dreaming of such a thing but it grew and grew on me and at last I couldn't rest till I found out. I didn't think it was so but it began to seem just possible, a wild possibility that I must satisfy to myself, the more I couldn't find her. I somehow felt she was in Brisbane somewhere and I learnt how easily one slips down to the bottom when one starts slipping and has no friends. So I used to go on Queen Street at night and look for her there. But I never saw her. I wanted to ask about her but I couldn't bear to. I thought of asking the Salvation Army people but when I went one night I couldn't.

"At last one night when we'd been working late at the shop, till eleven, as we did very often in busy times without getting any overtime pay though they turned us off as they pleased when work got slack, I saw a girl coming that I thought I'd ask. She was painted up and powdered and had flaring clothes but she looked kind. It was a quiet street where I met her and before I had time to change my mind she got to me and I stopped and asked her. I told her I'd lost my sister and did she know anything of her. She didn't laugh at me or say anything rude but talked nice and said she didn't think so and I mustn't think about that but if I liked she'd find out. I told her the name but she said that wasn't any good because girls always changed their name and she looked like crying when she said this. I had a photograph of Mary's that I always carried with me to show anybody who might have seen her without knowing her and the girl said if I'd trust her with it for a week she'd find Mary if she was in Brisbane and meet me. So I lent it to her. And we were just talking a bit and she was telling me that she was from London and that when she was a little girl a great book-writer used to pat her on the head and call her a pretty little thing and give her pennies and how she'd run away from home with a young officer, who got into trouble afterwards and came out to Australia without her and how she came out to find him and would some day, when a policeman came along and asked us what we were doing. She said we weren't doing anything and that he'd better mind his business and he said he knew her and she'd better keep a civil tongue in her head. Then he wanted to know what my name was and where I lived and the girl told me not to tell him or he'd play a trick on me and I didn't. But I told him I worked at dressmaking and roomed with another girl and he gave a kind of laugh and said he thought so and that if I didn't give him my name and address I'd have to come along with him. I began to cry and the girl told him he ought to be ashamed of himself ruining a poor hard-working girl who was looking for her sister and he only laughed again and said he knew all about that. I don't know what would have happened only just then an oldish man came along, wearing spectacles and with a kind sharp face, who stopped and asked what was the matter. The policeman was very civil to him and seemed to know him and told him that I wouldn't give him my address and that I was no good and that he was only doing his duty. The girl called the policeman names and told how it really was, only not my name, and the man looked at me and told the policeman I was shabby enough to be honest and that he'd answer for me and the policeman touched his hat and said 'good-night, sir,' and went on. Then the man told me I'd had a narrow escape and that it should be a lesson to me to keep out of bad company and I told him the girl had told the truth and he laughed, but not like the policeman, and said that was all the more reason to be careful because policemen could do what they liked with dressmakers who had no friends. Then be pulled out some money and told me to be a good girl and offered it to me, so kindly, but of course I didn't take it. Then he shook hands and walked off. There are kind people in the world, Ned, but we don't always meet them when we need them. I didn't know then how much he did for me or what cruel, wicked laws there are.

"Next week I met the girl again. I wanted so to find Mary I didn't care for all the policemen. I knew when I saw her coming that she'd found her. I didn't seem to care much, only as though something had snapped. It was only afterwards, when Mary was dead, that I used to get nearly crazy. I never told anybody, not even my room-mate, that I'd found her.

"She was in the hospital, dying, Mary was. I've heard since how that awful life kills the tender-hearted ones soon and Mary wasn't 21. She was in a bleak, bare ward, with a screen round her, and near by you could hear other girls laughing and shouting. You wouldn't have known her. Only her eyes were the same, such loving, tender eyes, when she opened them and saw me. She looked up and saw me standing there by the bedside and before she could shrink away I put my arms round her neck and kissed her forehead, where I used to kiss her, because I was the tallest, just where the hair grew. And I told her that she mustn't mind me and that she was my dear, dear sister and that she should have let me known because it had taken me so long to find her. And she didn't say anything but clung tight to me as though she would never let me go and then all at once her arms dropped and when I lifted my head she had fainted and her eyelids were wet.

"She died three days after. I made some excuse to get away and saw her every day. She hardly spoke she was so weak but she liked to lie with my hand in hers and me fanning her. She said that first day, when she came to, that she thought I would come. But she wouldn't have written or spoken a word, Mary wouldn't. She didn't even ask after the folks at home or how I was getting on. She said once she was so tired waiting and I knew she meant waiting to die. She didn't want to live. The last day she lay with her eyes half-closed, looking at me, and all at once her lips moved. I bent down to her and heard her murmur: 'I did try, Nellie, I did try,' and I saw she was crying. I put my arms round her and kissed her on the forehead and told her that I knew she had, and then she smiled at me, such a sweet pitiful smile, and then she stopped breathing. That was the only change.

"I couldn't stay in Brisbane. I was afraid every minute of meeting somebody who'd known Mary and who might ask me about her, or of father or uncle or somebody coming down. I wrote home and said I'd found out that Mary had died in the hospital of fever and they never thought of wanting to know any more, they were so full of grief. And then I got wondering how I should get away, somewhere, where nobody would be likely to come to ask me about her, and I couldn't go because I had no money and I was just wishing one day that I could see you when who should I meet but that Long Jack. He gave me your address and I wrote to ask you to lend me thirty shillings, the fare to Sydney, and you sent me five pounds, Ned. That's how I came here. Mary wouldn't have anybody know if she could help it and I couldn't have stayed there to meet people who knew her and would have talked of her."



CHAPTER V.

AS THE MOON WANED.

The shadows were beginning to throw again as Nellie finished telling her story. The quarters had sounded as they walked backwards and forwards. It was past one when they stopped again under the lamp-post at the corner.

"You see, Ned," she went on. "Mary couldn't help it. It's easy enough to talk when one has everything one wants or pretty well everything but when one has nothing or pretty well nothing, it's different. I've been through it and know. The insults, the temptations, the constant steady pressure all the time. If you are poor you are thought by swagger people fair game. And, even workingmen, the young ones, who don't think themselves able to marry generally, help hunt down their working sisters. Women can't always earn enough to live decently and men can't always earn enough to marry on; and when well-to-do men get married they seem to get worse instead of better, generally. So upon the hungry, the weary, the hopeless, girls who have to patch their own boots and go threadbare and shabby while others have pretty things, and who are despised for their shabbiness by the very hypocrites who cant about love of dress, and who have folks at home whom they love, and who are penniless as well and in that abject misery which comes when there isn't any money to buy the little things, upon these is forced the opportunity to change all this if only for a little while. Besides, you know, women have the same instincts as men—why do we disguise these things and pretend they haven't and shouldn't when we know that it is right and healthy that they should?— and though it is natural for a woman to hate what is called vice, because she is better than man—she is the mother-sex, you know—yet the very instincts which if things were right would be for good and happiness seem to make things worse when everything is wrong. Women who work, growing girls as many are, have little pleasure in their lives, less even than men. And wiseacres say we are light and frivolous and chattering, because most women can only find relief in that and know of nothing else, though all the time in the bottom of their hearts there are deep wells of human passion and human love. If you heard sewing-room talk you would call us parrots or worse. If you knew the sewing-room lives you would feel as I do."

He did not know what to say.

"For myself," straightening herself with unconscious pride, "it has not been so much. I have been hungry and almost ragged, here in Sydney, wearing another girls dress when I went to get slop-work, so as to look decent, living on rye bread for days at a time, working for thirty-eight hours at a stretch once so as to get the work done in time to get the money. That's sweating, isn't it? Of course I'm all right now. I get thirty shillings a week for draping and the wife of the boss wants to keep on friendly terms with Mrs. Stratton and I'm a good hand, so I can organise without being victimised for it. But even when I was hardest up it wasn't the same to me as to most girls. As a last resort I used to think always of killing myself. That would have been ever so much easier to me than the other thing. But I am hard and strong. I've heard my mother say that her father was the first of his people to wear boots. They went barefooted before then and I'm barefooted in some things yet. Mary wasn't like me, but better, not so hard or so selfish. And so, she couldn't help it, any more than I can."

"Nellie," he said, speaking the thought he had been thinking for an hour. "What difference does all this make between you and me?"

"Don't you understand?" she cried. "When people marry they have children. And when my sister Mary ended so, who is safe? Nothing we can do, no care we can take, can secure a child against misery while the world is what it is. I try to alter things for that. I would do anything, everything, no matter what, to make things so that little children would have a chance to be good and happy. Because the unions go that way I am unionist and because Socialism means that I am Socialist and I love whatever strikes at things that are and I hate everything that helps maintain them. And that is how we all really feel who feel at all, it is the mother in us, the source of everything that is good, and mothers do not mind much how their children are bettered so long as they are bettered. No matter what the bushmen do up there in Queensland, my heart is with them, so long as they shake this hateful state of things. I can't remember when everybody round weren't slaving away and no good coming of it. My father has only a mortgaged farm to show for a life of toil. My sister, my own sister, who grew up like a flower in the Queensland bush and worked her fingers to the bone and should have been to-day a happy woman with happy children on her knee, they picked her up when she lay dying in the gutter like a dog and in their charity gave her a bed to die on when they wouldn't give her decent wages to live on. Everywhere I've been it's the same story, men out of work, women out of work, children who should be at school the only ones who can always get work. Everywhere men crawling for a job, sinking their manhood for the chance of work, cringing and sneaking and throat-cutting, even in their unionism. In every town an army of women like my Mary, women like ourselves, going down, down, down. Honesty and virtue and courage getting uncommon. We're all getting to steal and plunder when we get a chance, the work people do it, the employers do it, the politicians do it. I know. We all do it. Women actually don't understand that they're selling themselves often even when a priest does patter a few clap-trap phrases over them. Oppression on every hand and we dare not destroy it. We haven't courage enough. And things will never be any better while Society is as it is. So I hate what Society is. Oh! I hate it so. If word or will of mind could sweep it away to leave us free to do what our inner hearts, crushed by this industrialism that we have, tell us to do it should go. For we've good in our hearts, most of us. We like to do what's kind, when we've a chance. I've found it so, anyway. Only we're caught in this whirl that crushes us all, the poor in body and the rich in soul. But till it goes, if it ever goes, I'll not be guilty of bringing a child into such a hell as this is now. That to me would be a cruelty that no weakness of mine, no human longing, could excuse ever. For no fault of her own Mary's life was a curse to her in the end. And so it may be with any of us. I'll not have the sin of giving life on me."

They stood face to face looking into each other's eyes. Unflinchingly she offered up her own heart and his on the altar of her ideal.

He read on her set lips the unalterability of her determination. It was on his tongue to suggest that it was easy to compromise, but there was that about her which checked him. Above all things there was a naturalness about her, an absence of artificiality, the emanation of a strong and vigorous womanliness. The very freedom of her speech was purity itself. The dark places of life had been bared to her and she did not conceal the fact or minimise it but she spoke of it as something outside of herself, as not affecting her excepting that it roused in her an intense sympathy. She was indeed the barefooted woman in her conception of morality, in her frankness and in her strong emotions untainted by the gangrene of a rotting civilisation. To suggest to her that fruitless love, that barren marriage, which destroys the soul of France and is spreading through Australia, would be to speak a strange language to her. He could say nothing. He was seized with a desire to get away from her.

"Good-bye!" he said, holding out his hand. She took it in both her own.

"Ned!" she cried. "We part friends, don't we? If there is a man in the world who could make me change my mind, it's you. Wherever you go I shall be thinking of you and all life through I shall be the same. You have only to let me know and there's nothing possible I wouldn't do for you gladly. We are friends, are we not? Mates? Brother and sister?"

Brother and sister! The spirit moved in Ned's hot heart at the words. Geisner's words came to him, nerving him.

"No!" he answered. "Friends? Yes. Mates? Yes. Brother and sister? No, never. I don't feel able to talk now. You're like a thorn bush in front of me that it's no use rushing at. But I'm not satisfied. You're wrong somewhere and I'm right and the right thing is to love when Love comes even if we're to die next minute. I'm going away and I may come back and I mayn't but if I do you'll see my way. I shall think it out and show you. Why, Nellie, I'm a different man already since you kissed me. You and I together, why, we'd straighten things out if they were a thousand times as crooked. What couldn't we do, you and me? And we'll do it yet, Nellie. When I come back you'll have me and we two will give things such a shaking that they'll never be the same again after we've got through with them. Now, goodbye! I'll come back if it's years and years, and you'll wait for me, I know. Good-bye, till then."

She felt her feet leave the ground as he lifted her to him in a hug that made her ribs ache for a week, felt his willing lips on her passive ones, felt his long moustache, his warm breath, his reviving passion. Then she found herself standing alone, quivering and pulsating, watching him as he walked away with the waddling walk of the horseman.

In her heart, madly beating, two intense feelings fought and struggled. The dominant thought of years, to end with herself the life that seems a curse and not a blessing, to be always maid, to die in the forlorn hope and to leave none to sorrow through having lived by her, was shaken to its base by a new-born furious desire to yield herself utterly. It came to her to run after Ned, to go with him, to Queensland, to the bush, to prison, to the gallows if need be. An insane craving for him raged within her as her memory renewed his kisses on her lips, his crushing arm-clasp, the strength that wooed with delicious bruisings, the strong personality that smote against her own until she longed to stay the smiting. It flashed through her mind that crowning joy of all joys would be to have his child in her arms, to rear a little agitator to carry on his father's fight when Ned himself was gone for ever.

Then—she stamped her foot in self-contempt and walked resolutely to her door. When she got up to her room she went to the open window and, kneeling down there, watched with tearless eyes the full white moon that began to descend towards the roofs amid the gleaming stars of the cloudless sky.

The hours passed and she still knelt watching, tearless and sleepless, mind and body numbed and enwrapped by dull gnawing pain.

* * * * *

Pain is to fight one's self and to subdue one's self. Nellie fought with herself and conquered.

A paradox this seems but is not, for in truth each individual is more than one, far more. Every living human is a bundle of faggot faculties, in which bundle every faculty is not an inert faggot but a living, breathing, conscious serpent. The weakling is he in whose forceless nature one serpent after another writhes its head up, dominant for a moment only, doomed to be thrust down by another fancy as fickle. The strong man is he whose forceful nature casts itself to subdue its own shifting desires by raising one supreme above the others and holding it there by identifying the dearest aspirations with its supremacy. And we call that man god-like whose heart yearns towards one little ideal, struggling for existence amid the tumultuous passions that clash in him around it, threatening to stifle it, and whose personality drives him to pick this ideal out and to lift it up and to hold it supreme lifelong. He himself is its bitterest enemy, its most hateful foe, its would-be murderer. He himself shrinks from and cowers at and abhors the choking for its sake of faculties that draw titanic strength from the innermost fibres of his own being. Yet he himself shelters and defends and battles for this intruder on his peace, this source of endless pain and brain-rending sorrow. A strength arises within him that tramples the other strength underfoot; he celebrates his victory with sighs and tears. So the New rises and rules until the Old is shattered and broken and fights the New no more; so Brutality goes and so Humanity comes.

Nellie fought with herself kneeling there at her window, watching the declining moon, staring at it with set eyes, grimly willing herself not to think because to think was to surrender. Into heart and ear and brain the serpents hissed words of love and thoughts of unspeakable joy. Upon her lips they pressed again Ned's hot kisses. Around her waist they threw again the clasping of his straining arms. "Why not? Why not?" they asked her. "Why not? Why not?" they cried and shouted. "Why not? Oh, why not?" they moaned to her. And she stared at the radiant moon and clenched her fingers on the window sill and would not answer. Only to her lips rose a prayer for death that she disowned unuttered. Had she fallen so low as to seek refuge in superstition, she thought, and from that moment she bore her agony in her own way.

It did pass through her mind that the ideal she had installed in her passionate heart did not aid her, that it had shrunk back out of sight and left her alone to fight for it against herself, left her alone to keep her life for it free from the dominance of these mad passions that had lifted their heads within her and that every nerve in her fought and bled for. She crushed this back also. She would not think. Only she would be loyal to her conception of Right even though the agony of her loyalty drove her mad.

She knew what Pain meant, now. She drank to the very dregs the cup of human misery. To have one's desires within one's reach, to have one's whole being driving one to stretch out one's hand and satisfy the eternal instincts within, and to force one's self to an abnegation that one's heart revolts from, that indeed was Pain to her. She learnt the weakness of all the philosophies as in a flash of lightning one sees clearly. She could have laughed at the sophism that one chooses always that which pleases one most. She knew that there are unfathomed depths in being which open beneath us in great crises and swallow up the foundations on which we builded and thought sure. She paralysed her passion intuitively, waiting, as one holds breath in the water when a broken wave surges over.

Gradually she forgot, an aching pain in her body lulling the aching pain of her mind. Gradually the white disc of the moon expanded before her and blotted out all active consciousness. Slowly the fierce serpents withdrew their hissing heads again. Slowly the ideal she had fought for lifted itself again within her. She began to feel more like her old self, only strangely exhausted and sorrowful. She was old, so old; weary, so weary. Hours went by. She passed into abstraction.

The falling of the moon behind the roofs roused her. She gazed at its disappearing rim in bewilderment, for the moment not realising. Then the sense of bodily pain dawned on her and assured her of the Reality.

She stood up, feeling stiff and bruised, her back aching, her head swimming, all her desiring ebbing as the moon waned. Already the glimmer of dawn paled the moonshine. She could hear the crowing of the cocks, the occasional rumble of a cart, the indescribable murmur that betokens an awakening city. The night had gone at last and the daylight had come and she had worn herself out and conquered. She thought this without joy; it was her fate not her heart. Nature itself had come to her rescue, the very Nature she had resisted and denied.

She struck a light and looked into the glass, curious to know if she were the same still. Dark circles surrounded her eyes, her nose was pinched, her cheeks wan, on her forehead between the brows were distinct wrinkles, from the corners of the mouth were chiselled deeply the lines of pain. She was years older. Could it be possible that only five hours ago she had flung herself into a lover's arm by the moonlit water, a passionate girl, in womanhood's first bloom? She had cast those days behind her for ever, she thought; she would serve the Cause alone, henceforth, while she lived. Rest, eternal rest, must come at last; she could only hope that it would come soon. At least, if she lived without joy, she would die without self-reproach.

Exhausted, she sank to sleep almost as her head touched the pillow. And in her sleep she lived again that night at the Strattons with Ned and heard Geisner profess God and condemn her hatred of maternity. "You close the gates of Life," he said. Taking her hand he led her to where a great gate stood, of iron, brass bound, and there behind it a great flood of little children pressed and struggled, dashing and crashing till the great gates shook and tottered.

"They will break the gates open," she cried to him in anguish.

"Did you deem to alter the unalterable?" he asked. And his voice was Ned's voice and turning round she saw it was Ned who held her hand. They stood by the harbour side again and she loved him. Again her whole being melted into his as he kissed her. Again they were alone in the Universe, conscious only of an ineffable joy.

* * * * *

"Time to get up, Nellie!" called Mrs. Phillips, who was knocking at the door. Nellie's working day began again.



CHAPTER VI.

UNEMPLOYED.

After ten minutes' walking Ned reached a broad thoroughfare. Hesitating for a moment, to get his bearings, he saw across the way one of the cheap restaurants of which "all meals sixpence" is the symbol and which one sees open until all sorts of hours. The window was still lighted, so Ned, parched with thirst, entered to get a cup of coffee. It was a clean-looking place, enough. He saw on the wall the legend "Clean beds" as he gulped down his coffee thirstily from the saucer.

"Can you put me up to-night?" he asked, overpowered with a drowsiness that dulled even his thoughts about Nellie and unwilling to walk on to his hotel.

"Yes, sir," answered the waiter, a young man who was making preparations to close for the night. "In half a minute."

Soon a cabman had finished his late midnight meal and departed. But another passer-by dropped in, who was left over a plate of stew while the waiter led Ned to a narrow stair at the end of the room, passing round a screen behind which a stout, gray-haired man slumbered in an arm chair with all the appearance of being the proprietor. The waiter showed Ned the way with a lighted match, renewed when burnt out. Ned noticed that the papered walls and partitions of the stairway and upper floor were dirty, torn and giving way in patches. From the first landing a dark narrow passage led towards the front street while three or four ricketty, cracked doors were crowded at the stairhead. Snoring sounds came from all quarters. The waiter turned up a still narrower twisting stairway. As they neared the top Ned could see a dim light coming through an open doorway.

The room to which he was thus introduced was some fifteen feet long and as many broad, on the floor. Two gabled windows, back and front, made with the centre line of the low-sloping ceiling a Greek cross effect. A single candle, burning on a backless chair by one of the windows, threw its flickering light on the choked room-full of old-fashioned iron bedsteads, bedded in make-shift manner, six in all, four packed against the wall opposite the door at which the stairs ended and one on each side of the window whereby was the light. On one of these latter beds a bearded man lay stretched, only partly undressed; on its edge sat a youth in his shirt. Although it was so late they were talking.

"Not gone to bed yet?" asked the waiter.

"Hullo, Jack!" replied the youth. "Aren't you coming to bed yet?"

"A gentleman of Jack's profession," said the bearded man, whose liquorous voice proclaimed how he had put in his evening, "doesn't require to go to bed at all. 'Gad, that's very good. You understand me?" He referred his wit to the youth. He spoke with the drawling hesitation of the English "swell."

"I understand you," replied the youth, in a respectful voice that had acquired its tone in the English shires.

"I don't get much chance whether I require it or not," remarked Jack, with an American accentuation, proceeding to make up the other bed by the light. There was nothing on the grimy mattress but a grimy blanket, so he brought a couple of fairly clean sheets from a bed in the opposite corner and spread them dexterously.

"Have we the pleasure of more company, Jack?" enquired the broken-down swell. "You understand me?"

"I understand you," said the English lad.

"This gentleman's going to stay," replied Jack, putting the sheet over the caseless pillow.

"Glad to make your acquaintance, sir," said the swell to Ned, upon this introduction. "We can't offer you a chair but you're welcome to a seat on the bed. If you can't offer a man wine give him whisky, and if you haven't got whisky offer him the best you've got." This last to the youth. "You understand me?"

"I understand you," said the youth. "I understand you perfectly."

"Thanks," replied Ned. "But it won't hurt to stand for a minute. There ain't much room to stand though, is there?"

His head nearly touched the ceiling in the highest part; on either side it sloped sharply, the slope only broken by the window gables, the stair casement being carried into the very centre of the room to get height for the door. The plaster on the ceiling had come off in patches, as if cannon-balled by unwary heads, showing the lath, and was also splashed by the smoke-wreaths of carelessly held candles; the papering was half torn from the shaky plastering of the wall; the flooring was time-eaten. A general impression of uncleanness was everywhere. On a ricketty little table behind the candle was a tin basin and a cracked earthenware pitcher. Excepting a limited supply of bedroom ware, which was very strongly in evidence, there was no other furniture. Looking round, Ned saw that on the bed opposite the door, hidden in the shadows, a man lay groaning and moaning. Through the windows could be seen the glorious moonlight.

"No. A man wants to be careful here," said the waiter, throwing the blanket over the sheets and straightening it in a whisk. "There," he went on, "will that suit you?"

"Anything'll suit me," said Ned, pulling off his coat and hanging it over the head of the postless bed. "I'm much obliged."

"That's all right," replied Jack, cheerfully. "I'll be up to bed soon," he informed the others and ran down stairs again.

"Will you have a cigarette?" asked the English lad, holding out a box.

"Thanks, but I don't smoke," answered Ned, who had pulled off his boots and was wrestling with his shirt. Finally it came over his head. He lay down in his underclothing, having first gingerly turned back the blanket to the foot.

"I don't desire to be personal," said the broken-down swell. "You'll excuse me, but I must say you're a finely built man. You understand me? No offence!"

"He is big," chipped in the youth.

"You don't offend a man much by telling him he's well built," retorted Ned, with an attempt at mirth.

"Certainly. You understand me. It's not the size, my boy"—to the youth. "Size is nothing. It's the proportion, the capacity for putting out strength. I've been an athlete myself and I'm no chicken yet. But our friend here ought to be a Hercules. Will you take a drink? You'll excuse the glass." He offered Ned a flask half full of whisky.

"Thanks just the same but I never drink," answered Ned, stretching himself carelessly. The lad refused also.

"You're wise, both of you," commented the other, swallowing down a couple of mouthfuls of the undiluted liquor. "If I'd never touched it I should have been a wealthy man to-day. But I shall be a wealthy man yet. You understand me?"

"Yes," answered Ned, mechanically. He was looking at the frank, open, intelligent face and well-made limbs of the half-naked lad opposite and wondering what he was doing here with this grizzled drunkard. The said grizzled drunkard being the broken-down swell, whose highly-coloured face, swollen nose and slobbery eyes told a tale that his slop-made clothes would have concealed. "How old are you?" he asked the lad, the drunkard having fallen asleep in the middle of a discourse concerning a great invention which would bring him millions.

"I'm nineteen."

"You look older," remarked Ned.

"Most people think I'm older," replied the lad proudly.

"You're not a native."

"No. I'm from the west of England."

"Which county?"

"Devon."

"My father's Devon," said Ned, at which the poor lad looked up eagerly, as though in Ned he recognised an old friend.

"That's strange, isn't it? How you meet people!" he remarked.

"I've never been there, you know," explained Ned. "Fact is I don't think it would be well for me to go. If all my old dad used to say is true I'd soon get shipped out."

"How's that?"

"Why, they transport a man for shooting a rabbit or a hare, don't they? My dad told me a friend of his was sent out for catching salmon and that his mother was frightened nearly to death when she knew he'd been off fishing one night. Of course, they don't transport to here any more. We wouldn't have it. But they do it to somewhere still, I suppose."

"I don't know, I'm sure," answered the lad. "I never heard much about that. I came out when I was fourteen."

"How was that?"

"Well, there was nothing to do in England that had anything in it and everybody was saying what a grand country Australia was and how everybody could get on and so I came out."

"Your folks come?"

"My father was dead. I only had a stepfather."

"And he wanted to get rid of you, eh?" enquired Ned, getting interested.

"I suppose he did, a little," said the lad, colouring.

"You came out to Sydney?"

"No. To Brisbane. That didn't cost anything."

"You hadn't any friends?"

"No. I got into a billet near Stanthorpe, but when I wanted a raise they sacked me and got another boy. Then I came across to New South Wales. It wasn't any use staying in Queensland. I wish I'd stayed in England," he added.

"How's that?"

"I can't get work. I wouldn't mind if I could get a job but it's pretty hard when you can't."

"Can't you get work?"

"I haven't done a stroke for ten weeks."

"Well, are you hard up?" enquired Ned, to whose bush experience ten weeks out-of-work meant nothing.

"Look here," returned the lad, touching the front of his white shirt and the cuffs. Ned saw that what he had taken for white flannel in the dim candle-light was white linen, guileless of starch, evidently washed in a hand-basin at night and left to dry over a chair till morning. "A man's pretty hard up—ain't he?—when he can't get his shirt laundried."

"That's bad," said Ned, sympathetically, determining to sympathise a pound-note. Starched shirts did not count to him personally but he understood that the town and the bush were very different.

"I've offered three times to-day to work for my board," said the lad, not tremulously but in the matter-of-fact voice of one who had looked after himself for years.

"Where was that?" asked Ned, wide-awake at last, alarmed for the bushmen rapidly turning over in his mind the effect of strong young men being ready to work for their board.

"One place was down near the foot of Market Street, a produce merchant. He told me he couldn't, that it was as much as he could do to provide for his own family. Another place was at a wood and coal yard and the boss said I'd leave in a week at that price so it wasn't any good talking. The other was a drayman who has a couple of drays and he said he'd never pay under the going wage to anybody and gave me sixpence. He said it was all he could afford because times were so bad."

"Are you stumped then?" asked Ned.

"I haven't a copper."

Just then the broken-down swell woke up from his doze and demanded his flask. After some search it was found underneath him. Then, heedless of his interruptions, Ned continued the conversation.

"Do they take you here on tick?" he enquired.

"Tick! There's no tick here. That old man downstairs is as hard as nails. Why, if it hadn't been for this gentleman I'd have had to walk about all night or sleep in the Domain."

"Fair dues, my boy, fair dues?" put in the broken-down swell, "Never refer to private matters like that. You make me feel ashamed, my boy. I should never have mentioned that little accommodation. You understand me?"

"I understand you," replied the lad. "I understand you perfectly."

"That's all right," said Ned, suddenly feeling a respect for this grizzled drunkard. "We must all help one another. How was it?"

"Well," said the lad. "I met a friend of mine and he gave me sixpence and this box of cigarettes. It was all he had. I've often slept here and so I came and asked the old man to trust me the other half. He wouldn't listen to it. I was going away when this gentleman came along. He only had threepence more than his own bed-money but he persuaded the old man to knock off threepence and he'd pay threepence. I thought I'd have had to go to the Domain."

"But that's nothing," said Ned. "I'd just as soon sleep out as sleep in."

"I've never come down to sleeping out yet," returned the lad, simply. "Perhaps your being a native makes a difference." Ned was confronted again with the fact that the bushman and the townsman view the same thing from opposite sides. To this lad, struggling to keep his head up, to lie down nightly in the Domain meant the surrender of all self-respecting decency.

"I shouldn't have brought up the subject. You understand me?" said the drunkard. "But now it's mentioned I'll ask if you noticed how I talked over that old scoundrel downstairs. You understand me? Where's that flask? My God! I am feeling bad," he continued, sitting up on the bed.

"You're drinking too much," remarked Ned.

The man did not reply, but, with a groan, pushed the lad aside, sprang from the bed, and began to retch prodigiously into the wash basin, after which he announced himself better, lay down and took another drink. Meanwhile the man in the far corner tossed and groaned as if he were dying.

"You're friend's still worse," said the lad.

"He's just out of the hospital. I told him he shouldn't mix his drinks so soon but he would have his own way. He'll be all right when he's slept it off. A man's a fool who gets drunk. You understand me?"

"I understand you," said the lad. "I never want to get drunk. All I want is work."

"Why don't you go up to Queensland?" asked the man, to Ned's hardly suppressed indignation. "The pastoralists would be glad to get a smart-looking lad like you. Good pay, all expenses paid, and a six months' agreement! I believe that's the terms. You understand me?"

"I understand you," said the English lad. "I understand you perfectly. But that's blacklegging and I'd sooner starve than blackleg. I ain't so hard up yet that I'll do either."

"Put it there, mate," cried Ned, stretching his hand out. "You're a square little chap." His heart rose again at this proof that the union spirit was spreading.

"You're a good boy," said the drunkard, slapping his shoulder. "I'm not a unionist and I'm against the unions. You understand me? I am a gentleman —poor drunken broken-down swell-and a gentleman must stick to his own Order just as you stick to your Order. I'd like to see the working classes kept in their places, but I despise a traitor, my boy. You understand me?"

"I understand you perfectly," said the lad.

"Yet you'd work for your board?" said Ned, enquiringly.

"I suppose I shouldn't," said the lad. "But one must live. I wouldn't cut a man out of a job by going under him when he was sticking up for what's right but where nobody's sticking up what's the use of one kicking. That's how I look at it. Of course, a lot don't."

"They'll get a lot to go then?"

"I think they'll get a lot. Some fellows are so low down they'll do anything and a lot more don't understand. I didn't use to understand."

"Would you go up with them for the union?" asked Ned, after a pause.

"You mean to come out again?"

"Yes, and to get as many to come out as you can by explaining things. It may mean three months' gaol so you want to make up your mind well."

"I wouldn't mind going to gaol for a thing like that. It's not being in gaol but what you're in for that counts, isn't it?"

So they talked while the two drunkards groaned and tossed, the stench of this travellers' bedroom growing every moment more unbearable. Finally the waiter returned.

"Not gone to bed yet," he exclaimed. "Phew! This is a beauty to-night, a pair of beauties. Ain't it a wonder their insides don't poison 'em?"

"I thought I'd never get to bed," he went on, coming to light his pipe at the candle and then returning to the bed he had taken Ned's sheets from. "First one joker in, then another, and the old man 'ud stay open all night for a tanner. Past two! Jolly nice hour for a chap that's to be up at six, ain't it?"

He pulled off his boots and vest and threw himself down on the bare mattress in his trousers. "Ain't you fellows going to bed to-night?" he enquired.

"It's about a fair thing," said Ned, feeling nervous and exhausted with lack of sleep. So the young fellow blew the candle out and went over to the bed a adjoining Jack's. As he lay down Jack picked up a boot and tapped the wall alongside him gently. "I think I hear her," he remarked. In a few moments there was an answering tap.

"Who's that?" asked Ned.

"The slavey next door," answered Jack, upon which an interchange of experience took place between Jack and the young fellow in which gable windows and park seats and various other stage-settings had prominent parts.

At last they all slept but Ned. Drowsy as he was he could not sleep. It was not that he thought much of Nellie, at least he did not feel that he was thinking of her. He only wanted to sleep and forget and he could not sleep. The moonshine came through the curtainless window and lit up the room with a strange mysterious light. The snoring breathing that filled the room mingled with other snoring sounds that seemed to come up the stairway and through the walls. The stench of the room stifled him. The drunkards who tossed there, groaning; this unemployed lad who lay with his white limbs kicked free and bathed in the moonlight; the tired waiter who lay motionless, still dressed; were there with him. The clock-bells struck the quarters, then the hour.

Three o'clock.

He had never felt so uncomfortable, he thought, so uneasy. He twisted and squirmed and rubbed himself. Suddenly a thought struck him. He leaned up on his elbow for a moment, peering with his eyes in the scanty light, feeling about with his hand, then leaped clean out of the bed. It swarmed with vermin.

Like most bushmen, Ned, who was sublimely tolerant of ants, lizards and the pests of the wilds generally, shivered at the very thought of the parasites of the towns. To strip himself was the work of an instant, to carefully re-dress by the candle-end he lighted took longer; then he stepped to the English lad's side and woke him.

"Hello?" said the lad, rubbing his eyes in sleepy astonishment.

"What's the matter?"

"I can't sleep with bugs crawling over me," said Ned. "I'm going to camp out in the park. Here's a 'note' to help you along and here's the address to go to if you conclude to go up to Queensland for the union. I'll see about it first thing in the morning so he'll expect you. The 'note's' yours whether you go or not."

"I'm ever so much obliged," said the lad, taking the money and the slip of paper. "I'll go and I'll be square. You needn't be afraid of me and I'll pay it back, too, some day. Do you know the way out?"

"I'll find it all right," replied Ned.

"Oh! I'll go down with you or you'd never find it. It's through the back at night." So the good-hearted young fellow pulled on his trousers and conducted Ned down the creaking, stairway, through the kitchen and the narrow back yard to the bolted door that led to the alley behind.

"Shall I see you again?" asked the lad. Somehow everybody who met Ned wanted to see more of him.

"My name's Hawkins," replied Ned. "Ned Hawkins. Ask anybody in the Queensland bush about me, if you get there."

"I suppose you're one of the bushmen," remarked the lad, pausing. "If they're all as big as you it ought to be bad for the blacklegs."

"Why, I'm a small man up on the Diamantina," said Ned laughing. "Which is the way to the park?"

"Turn to your right at the end of the alley, then turn to the left. It's only five minutes' walk."

"Thanks. Good-bye!" said Ned.

"It's thank you. Good-bye!" said the lad.

They shook hands and parted. In a few minutes Ned was in the park. He stepped over a low railing, found a branching tree and decided to camp under it. He pulled his boots off and his coat, loosened his belt, put boots and coat under his head for a pillow, stretched out full length on the earth and in ten seconds was in a deep slumber.

He was roused a moment after, it seemed to him; in reality it was nearly six hours after—by kicks on the ribs. He turned over and opened his eyes. As he did so another kick made him stagger to his feet gasping with pain. A gorilla-faced constable greeted him with a savage grin.

"Phwat d'ye mane, ye blayguard, indaycently exposing yersilf in this parrt av th' doomane? Oi've as good a moind as iver a man had in the wurrld to run yez in. Can't ye find anither place to unthdress yersilf in, ye low vaygrant?"

Ned did not answer. He buttoned up the neck of his shirt, which had opened in the night, tightened his belt again, drew on his boots and thrust his arms into his coat. While he did so the constable continued his abuse, proud to show his authority in the presence of the crowd that passed in a continuous stream along the pathway that cut through the carefully tended flower-bedded lawn-like park. It was one of Ned's strong points that he could control his passionate temper. Much as he longed to thrash this insolent brute he restrained himself. He desired most of all to get back to Queensland and knew that as no magistrate would take his word against a "constable's" as to provocation received, to retaliate now would keep him in Sydney for a month at least, perhaps six. But his patience almost gave way when the constable followed as he walked away, still abusing him.

"You'd better not go too far," warned Ned, turning round.

It suddenly dawned upon the constable that this was not the ordinary "drunk" and that it was as well to be satisfied with the exhibition of authority already made. Ned walked off unmolested, chewing the cud of his thoughts.

This sentence of Geisner's rang in his ears:

"The slaves who 'move on' at the bidding of a policeman."



CHAPTER VII.

"THE WORLD WANTS MASTERS."

"It can't do any good. We have made up our minds that the matter might just as well be fought out now, no matter what it costs. We've made all our arrangements. There is nothing to discuss. We are simply going to do business in our own way."

"It can't do any harm. There is always something to be said on the other side and I always find workingmen fairly reasonable if they're met fairly. At any rate, you might as well see how they look at it. The labour agitation itself can't be stifled. The great point, as I regard it, is to make the immediate relations of Capital and Labour as peaceable as possible. The two parties don't see enough of each other."

"I think we see a great deal too much of them. It's a pretty condition of things when we can't go on with our businesses without being interfered with by mobs of ignorant fools incited by loud-tongued agitators. The fools have got to be taught a lesson some day and we might as well teach it to them now."

"You know I'm no advocate of Communism or Socialism or any such nonsense. I look at the matter solely from a business standpoint. I am a loser by disturbances in trade, so I try to prevent disturbances. I've always been able to prevent them in my own business and I think they can always be prevented."

"Well, Melsom, you may be right when it's a question of wages, but this is a question of principle. We're willing to confer if they'll admit 'freedom of contract.' That's all there is to say about it."

"But what is 'freedom of contract?' Besides, if it is questioned, there can't be much harm in understanding why. For my part, I find it an interminable point of discussion when it is raised and one of the questions that settles itself easily when it isn't."

"It is the key of the whole position. If we haven't a right to employ whoever we like at any terms we may make with any individual we employ what rights have we?" "Hear what they think of it, Strong! It can surely do no harm to find out what makes them fight so."

And so on for half an hour.

"Well, I don't mind having a chat with one of them," conceded Strong at last. "It's only because you persist so, Melsom. I suppose this man you've been told is in town is an oily, ignorant fellow, who'll split words and wrangle up a cloud of dust until nobody can tell what we're talking about. I've heard these fellows."

Thus it was that Ned, calling at the Trades Hall, after having washed and breakfasted at his hotel and seen to various items of union business about town, was greeted with the information that Mr. Melsom was looking for him.

"Who's Melsom?"

"Oh! A sort of four-leaved clover, a reasonable employer," answered his genial informant. "He's in a large way of business, interested in a good many concerns, and whenever he's got a finger in anything we can always get on with it. He's a great man for arbitration and conciliation and has managed to settle two or three disputes that I never thought would be arranged peaceably. He's a thoroughly decent fellow, I can assure you."

"What does he want with me, I wonder?"

"He wants you to see Strong, just to talk matters over and let Strong know how you Queenslanders look at things."

"Who's Strong?"

"Don't you know? He's managing director of the Great Southern Mortgage Agency. He's the man who's running the whole show on the other side and a clever man, too, don't you forget it."

Ned recollected the man he had seen at the restaurant and what Nellie had said of him, two years ago.

"But I can't see him without instructions. I must wire up to know what they say about it," said Ned.

"That's just what you mustn't do, old man. Strong won't consent to any formal interview, but told Melsom, that he'd be glad to see anybody who knew how the other side saw things, to chat the matter over as between one man and another. I told Melsom yesterday that you were in town till to-night and he came this morning to get you to see Strong at eleven. He'll be back before then. I told him I thought it would be all right."

"I don't see how I can do that without instructions," repeated Ned.

"If it were formal there could be only one possible instruction, surely," urged the other. "As it is absolutely informal and as all that Melsom hopes is that it may lead to a formal conference, I think you should go. You'd talk to anybody, wouldn't you? Besides, Melsom has his heart set on this. I don't believe it will lead to anything, mind you, but it will oblige him and he often does a good turn for us."

"That settles it," said Ned. "Only I'll have to say I'm only giving my own opinion and I'll have to talk straight whether he likes it or not."

"Of course. By the way, here are some wires that'll interest you, and I want to arrange about sending money up in case they proclaim the unions illegal. Heaven knows what they can't do now-a-days! Have you heard what they did here during the maritime strike?"

* * * * *

Shortly before eleven, Strong was closeted in his private office with a burly man of unmistakably bush appearance, modified both in voice and dress by considerable contact with the towns. Of sandy complexion, broad features and light-coloured eyes that did not look one full in the face, the man was of the type that attracts upon casual acquaintance but about which there is an indefinable something which, without actually repelling, effectually prevents any implicit confidence.

"You have been an officer of the shearers' union, you say?" enquired Strong, coldly.

"I've been an honorary officer, never a paid one," answered the man, who held his hat on his knee.

"There's a man in Sydney now, named Hawkins. Do you know him?"

"Yes. I've shorn with him out at the—"

"What sort of a man is he?" interrupted Strong.

"He's a young fellow. There's not much in him. He talks wild."

"Has he got much influence?"

"Only with his own set. Most of the men only want a start to break away from fellows like Hawkins. I'm confident the new anion I was talking of, admitting 'freedom of contract,' would break the other up and that Hawkins and the rest of them couldn't stop it."

"It seems feasible," said Strong, sharply. "At any rate, there's nothing lost by trying it. This is what we will do. We will pay you all expenses and six pounds a week from to-day to go up to Queensland, publicly denounce the union, support 'freedom of contract' and try to start another union against the present one; generally to act as an agent of ours. Payment will be made after you come out. Until then you must pay your own expenses."

"I think I should have expenses advanced," said the man.

"We know nothing of you. You represent yourself as so-and-so and if you are genuine there is no injustice done by our offer. You must take or leave it."

"I'll take it," said the man, after a slight hesitation.

"There's another matter. Do you know the union officials in Brisbane?"

"I know all of them, intimately."

"Then you may be able to do something with them. We are informed that they are implicated in all that's going on, the instigators of it. Bring us evidence criminally implicating them and we will pay well."

"This is business," said the man, a little shamefacedly. "What will you pay?"

Strong jotted some figures on a slip of paper. "If you are a friend of these men," he said, passing the slip over, "you will know their value apiece to you." A sneer he could not quite conceal peeped from under his business tone.

"That concludes our business, I think," he continued, tearing the slip up, having received it back. "I will instruct our secretary and you can call on him this afternoon."

He touched an electric bell-button on his desk. A clerk appeared at the door instantly.

"Show this man out by the back way," ordered Strong, glancing at the clock. "Good-day!"

The summarily dismissed visitor had hardly gone when another clerk announced Mr. Melsom.

"Anybody with him?"

"Yes, sir. A tall, bush-looking man."

"Show them both in."

"What sneaking brutes these fellows are!" Strong thought, contemptuously, jotting instructions on some letters he was glancing through, working away as one accustomed to making the most of spare minutes.

* * * * *

Mr. Melsom had left Ned and Strong together, having to attend to his own business which had already been sufficiently interfered with by his exertions on behalf of his pet theory of "getting things talked over." Ned had felt inwardly agitated as he walked under the great archway and up the broad iron stairway that led to the inner offices of this great fortress-like building, the centre of the southern money-power. He had noted the massive walls of hewn stone, the massive gates and the enormous bolts, chains and bars. In the outer office he had glanced a little nervously around the lofty, stuccoed, hall-like room, of which the wood-work was as massive in its way as were the stone walls without and of which the very glass of the partitions looked put in to stay, while the counters and desks, with their polished brass-work and great leathern-bound ledgers, seemed as solid as the floor itself; he wondered curiously what all these clerks did who leaned engrossed over their desks or flitted noiselessly here and there on the matting-covered flagstones of the flooring. Why he should be nervous he could not have explained. But he was cool enough when, after a minute's delay, a clerk led Melsom and himself through a smaller archway opening from this great office hall and up a carpetted stone stairway loading between two great bare walls and along a long lofty passage, wherein footfalls echoed softly on the carpetted stone floor. Finally they reached a polished, pannelled door which being opened showed Strong writing busily at a cabinet desk placed in the centre of the handsomely furnished office-room. The great financier greeted Melsom cordially, nodded civilly enough to Ned and agreed with the latter's immediate statement that he came, as a private individual solely, to see a private individual, at the request of Mr. Melsom.

"Now, where do we differ?" Strong asked, when Melsom had gone.

"We are you and me, of course," said Ned, putting his hat on the floor.

Strong nodded.

"Well, you have sat down at your desk here and drawn up a statement as to how I shall work without asking me. I object. I say that, as I'm concerned, you and I together should sit down and arrange how I shall work for you since I must work for you."

"In our agreement, that you refer to, we have tried to do what is fair," replied Strong, looking sharply at Ned.

"Do you want me to talk straight?" asked Ned. "Because, if you object to that, it's better for me to go now than waste words talking round the subject."

"Certainly," answered Strong. "Straight talk never offends me."

"Then how do I know you have tried to do fairly?" enquired Ned. "Our experience with the pastoralists leads us to think the opposite."

"There have been rabid pastoralists," admitted Strong, after a moment's thought, "just as there have been rabid men on the other side. I'll tell you this, that we have had great difficulty in getting some of the pastoralists to accept this agreement. We had to put considerable pressure on them before they would moderate their position to what we consider fair."

Ned did not reply. He stowed Strong's statement away for future use.

"Besides," remarked Strong, after a pause, during which he arranged the letters before him. "There is no compulsion to accept the agreement. If you don't like it don't work under it, but let those who want to accept it."

"I fancy that's more how it stands than by being fair," commented Ned, bitterly.

"Well! Isn't that fair?" asked Strong, leaning back in his office chair.

"Is it fair?" returned Ned.

"Well! Why not?"

"How can it be fair? We have nothing and you have everything. All the leases and all the sheep and all the cattle and all the improvements belong to you. We've got to work to live and we can't work except for you. What's the sense of your saying that if we don't like the agreement we needn't take it? We must either break the agreement or take it. That's how we stand."

"Well, what do you object to in it?"

"I don't know what the others object to in it. I know what I object to."

"That's what I want to know."

"Well, for one thing, when I've earned money it's mine. The minute I've shorn a sheep the price of shearing it belongs to me and not to the squatter. It's convenient to agree only to draw pay at certain times, but it's barefaced to deliberately withhold my money weeks after I've earned it, and it's thieving to forfeit wages in case a squatter and I differ as to whether the agreement's been broken or not."

"There ought to be some security that a pastoralist won't be put to loss by his men leaving him at a moment's notice," asserted Strong.

"You've got the law on your side," answered Ned. "You can send a man to prison, like a thief, if he has a row with a squatter after signing an agreement, but we can't send the squatter to prison if he's in fault. The Masters and Servants Act is all wrong and we'll alter it when we get a chance, I can assure you, but you're not content with the Masters and Servants Act. You want a private law all in your own hand."

"We've had a very serious difficulty to meet," said the other. "Men go on strike on frivolous pretext and we must protect our interests. We've not cut down wages and we don't intend to."

"You have cut down wages, labourers' wages," retorted Ned.

"That has been charged," replied Strong, lifting his eyebrows. "But I can show you the list of wages paid on our stations during the last five years and you will see that the wages we now offer are fully up to the average."

"That may be," said Ned. "But they are less than they were last year. I'm speaking now of what I know."

"Oh! There may be a few instances in which the unions forced up wages unduly which have been rectified," said Mr. Strong. "But the general rate has not been touched."

"The pastoralists wouldn't dare arbitrate on that," answered Ned. "In January, 1890, they tried to force down wages and we levelled them up. Now, they are forcing them down again. At least it seems that way to me."

"That matter might be settled, I think," said Strong, dismissing it. "What other objections have you to the agreement?"

"As an agreement I object to the whole thing, the way it's being worked. If it were a proposal I should want to know how about the Eight Hours and the Chinese."

"We don't wish to alter existing hours," answered Strong.

"Then why not put it down?"

"And we don't wish to encourage aliens."

"A good many pastoralists do and we are determined to try to stop them. It looks queer to us that nothing is said about it."

"Some certainly did urge that Chinese should be allowed in tropical Queensland but our influence is against that and we hope to restrain the more impetuous and thus prevent friction."

Ned shrugged his shoulders without answering.

"We hope—" began Strong. Then he broke off, saying instead: "I do not see why the men should regard the pastoralists as necessarily inimical and as not desirous of doing what is fair."

"Look here, Mr. Strong," said Ned leaning forward, as was his habit when in earnest. "We are beginning to understand things. We know that you people are after profits and nothing else, that to you we are like so many horses or sheep, only not so valuable because we're harder to break in and our carcasses aren't worth anything. We know that you don't care a curse whether we live or die and that you'd fill the bush with Chinese to-morrow if you could see your way to making an extra one per cent. by it."

"You haven't much confidence in us, at any rate," returned Strong, coolly. "But if we look carefully after profits you must recollect that a great deal of capital is trust funds. The widow and the orphan invest their little fortunes in our hands. Surely you wouldn't injure them?"

"I thought we were talking straight to one another," said Ned. "You will excuse me, Mr. Strong, for thinking that to talk 'widow and orphan' isn't worthy of a man like you unless you've got a very small opinion of me. When you think about our widows and orphans we'll think about your widows and orphans. That's only clap-trap. It doesn't alter the hard fact that you're only after profit and don't care what happens to us so long as you get it."

The financier bit his lips, flushing. He took up a letter and glanced over it before replying.

"Do you care what happens to us?"

"As things are, no. How can we? The worst that could happen to one of you would leave you as well off as the most fortunate of us. There is war between us, only I think it possible to be a little civilised and not to fight each other like savages as we are doing."

"I am glad you admit that some of your methods are savage."

"Of course I admit it," answered Ned. "That is my opinion of the way both sides fight now. Instead of conferring and arbitrating on immediate questions and leaving future questions to be talked over and understood and thoroughly threshed out in free discussion, we strike, you lockout, you victimise wholesale and, naturally, we retaliate in our own ways."

"You prefer to be left uninterrupted to preach this new socialistic nonsense?"

"Why not, if it is sound? And if it isn't sound, why not? Surely your side isn't afraid of discussion if it knows it's right."

"Do you really think that we should leave our individual rights to be decided upon by an ignorant mob?"

"My individual rights are at the mercy of ignorant individuals at present," said Ned. "I am not allowed to work if I happen to have given offence to a handful of squatters."

"I think you exaggerate," answered Strong. "I know that some pastoralists are very vindictive but I regard most of them as honorable men incapable of a contemptible action."

"Of course they are," said Ned. "The only thing is what do they call contemptible? You and I are very friendly, just now, Mr. Strong. You're not small enough to feel any hatred just because I talk a bit straight but you know very well that you'd regard it as quite square to freeze me out because I do talk straight."

The two men looked into each other's eyes. Strong began to respect this outspoken bushman.

"I think that one of the most fundamental of all rights in any civilised society is the right of a man to employ whom he likes at any terms and under any conditions that he can get men to enter his employment. It seems to me that without this right the very right to private property itself is disputed for in civilisation private property does not mean only a hoard, stored up for future use, but savings accumulated to carry on the industrial operations of civilisation. These savings have been prompted by the assurance that society will protect the man who saves in making, with the man who has not saved, the contracts necessary to carry on industry, unhampered by the interference of outsiders. That seems to me, I repeat, a fundamental right essential to the very existence of society. The man who disputes it seems to me an enemy of society. Whether he is right or wrong, or whether society itself is right or wrong, is another question with which, as it is a mere theory, practical men have nothing to do." Strong had only been fencing in his talk before. Now that he was ready he stated his position, quite coolly, with a quiet emphasis that made his line of argument clear as day.